Melbourne Uni start-up MetaCDN snags $2.3 million investment

MetaCDN, a web start-up born out of the University of Melbourne, has secured $US2.3 million in an investment round led by Australian venture capital firm Starfish Ventures.

The business, which was launched last year on the back of online analytics research done by the university, will use the cash injection to boost its sales and development efforts in the US and Europe.

MetaCDN calls itself a ‘next generation’ content platform that uses patent-pending technology to deliver content, streaming and analytics to businesses in a faster way.

The technology selects the best cloud service from a range of providers, based on speed, availability and price, to deliver content to websites. MetaCDN says that this was previously only available to large businesses.

Starfish’s investment is the latest backing the VC firm has given to an Australian start-up. It’s most notable recent deal was its involvement in a $1.2 million fund for ScriptRock.

Martin Ryan, CEO of MetaCDN, says: “In recent years, we’ve seen how cloud services can help business grow and scale and we’ve applied these principles to the CDN sector through our unique technology.”

“Ease of use and pay-as-you-use pricing lowers the hurdle for customers who can benefit from CDN services, and provides flexibility as their business grows.”

“There is a large and rapidly growing market for online businesses that can benefit from CDN services but they’ve been ignored or penalised by locked-in contracts, excessive charges and variable performance. We are changing that.”

“We are delighted to have the support of Starfish in this next phase of our growth and we’ll be using this injection of capital to expand our sales, development and support teams in the United States and Europe, to service our increasingly global customer base.”

Anthony Glenning, investor director at Starfish Ventures, adds: “We see MetaCDN as a next generation CDN provider.”

“This technology brings incredible value to an increasingly online world, and we expect MetaCDN to really shake up the market in the near future.”

“Similar to the way SaaS and the cloud have revolutionised software applications, MetaCDN is helping businesses by bringing the advantages of instant scalability and no contracts to CDNs.

“Leveraging the cloud makes MetaCDN super nimble which means value added services, technology advancements and cost reductions can be delivered to customers in real time. That’s a terrific business model.”